now I want to merge $result and $result2 into one variable so I can work with them together... how can I do that? Are they just regular arrays..? if I merged them together could I then do a mysql_num_rows($merged_var) function on it...?

I've decided to use a temporary table and just output what I want from each table into this temporary table and then pull the data from there... it seemed the most expedient method until UNION in mySQL 4.0.0!